Has social media realised George Orwell's vision of 1984?

If the hairs have been rising on the back of your neck this week, there are two possible causes. For one thing, every LOL and WTF texted​ or emailed or later talked about with your BFF on the telephone was being collected by the federal government: metadata retention operations started four days ago.

For another, the diverse likes of Catherine Deveny, Julian Burnside, Gillian Triggs, Bryan Dawe, Adam Bandt and 15 other politicians, journalists and broadcasters were yesterday taking turns to read chapters from George Orwell's 1984 in the Legislative Assembly chamber at Spring Street. 1984 is the "Big Brother is watching you" novel in which people are not free to have their own private thoughts.

President of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Gillian Triggs, reads from George Orwell's 1984 at Parliament House as part of the Melbourne Festival. Photo: Paul Jeffers

It seemed that life and art were pulling each other's noses.

The data retention laws are taken by many as further evidence that we, the citizenry, are increasingly subject to a Big Brother-style invasive tyranny.

But to what degree have we become complicit in this?

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774 ABC presenter Hilary Harper was one of the serial readers at Parliament House yesterday. "We talk a lot about privacy in the sense of shielding our information and activities from governments and corporations, but most of us have freely given over our brain space to the infosphere."

Ms Harper says that reading the book ahead of the performance triggered "reminders for me of how super-saturated we are with information – we all have our screens at home, and there's no escape from advertising, media, digital connections and news feeds – but our attention spans are short."

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In Orwell's book, social heretics are erased from history by drones in a government department. Harper suggests that, with our brains so full of stuff, a malignant government would have no need to fund such devilment. "It's a culture of forgetting, where a government doesn't even need to rewrite history, Big Brother style. They just have to wait for, or engineer, the next big Twitterstorm."

Dr Dan Woodman is TR Ashworth senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Melbourne. He notes that social media has spawned identity specialists who hire themselves out to erase inconvenient personal histories – those self-immolating gaffes on Twitter for example. Dr Woodman but wonders if they're truly needed. "We have access to so much information ... the world moves on."

A lot of that information is provided by us, the ordinary bean-eater. "There's an ongoing mass confession underway ... largely on social media. It's almost like a system that is encouraging you to act against your own interests to have an outpouring of emotion and honesty."

Woodman notes that any disquiet people might have about CCTV in city streets has been up-ended by the fact that just about everyone carries a camera in their pocket or handbag. Mostly these cameras provide a pictorial dimension to our online mass confessions, which in turn are vulnerable to cheerful mockery and vicious censure by friends and strangers alike. But they are also tools for capturing bad behaviour.

With this mixture of both confession and judgement, have we become a self-eating version of Orwell's Thought Police (the dreaded agents who come through the ceiling in the night time when you have breached social orthodoxy)?

Dr John Thrasher is a political and ethical philosopher at Monash University. He says the expansion of the web of surveillance over all aspects of our lives, as well as the ability and desire to share a multitude of our thoughts over social media, have now made it possible for individuals and groups to attempt to enforce their orthodoxy on those they disagree with.

"The dangers are no less, as some have argued, if the silencing comes from social pressure rather than from political restrictions."

Dr Adam Bandt is the federal MP for Melbourne and deputy leader of the Greens. He was also reading 1984 in Spring Street yesterday. He notes that the new world of digital communication has sprung "up from below rather than from above ... and has unleashed incredible new means for people to ... become democratic and start revolutions. But today revolutionary is tomorrow's tyrant."

Members of the public during George Orwell's 1984: A Live Reading at Parliament. Photo: Paul Jeffers

The pressing issue – as it is for Orwell's doomed protagonist Winston Smith – is how to maintain one's individuality when the world is crashing in so intimately.

"Being an individual is based on keeping a degree of distance between you and the broader world of communication ... it's also about communicating with each other according to some shared rules," he says. "What's happening is the distance between the individual world and the outside world of communication is collapsing."

Ever the optimist, Bandt thinks a kind of equilibrium of decency and common sense will come to pass when "we collectively work out what the new rules are to be a private individual in a public world are going to look like."

But has this communication revolution – and the attendant mass sharing and sticky-beaking – lowered the threshold for resistance against being under surveillance? Bandt says he doesn't equate technology with surveillance. And he feels there is a difference between sharing and being spied on.

But isn't one slyly allowing the other to some extent?

Philosopher John Thrasher says while we tend to think "there is a fundamental difference between sharing information about ourselves on Facebook or Twitter and having the government collect metadata about who we call or what we do online", it's probably the case that social media has "increased our tolerance with being observed somewhat".

Thrasher notes that the issue of privacy is a tricky one in terms of complying with socially expected behaviour. He cites a classic New York study in which only about 40 per cent of men washed their hands after using a public bathroom when alone. "But when a stranger was also in the washroom that number skyrocketed to around 80 per cent. Even minimal, interested observation can have the effect of making us behave ourselves in sensible ways."

So maybe sometimes having a big brother watching isn't always such a bad idea.